Bottled Water and Going Green

I’m happy and grateful for the earth. In this season and age of plenty, the popular expression “reduce, reuse, recycle” has never made more sense. If we want a world where our grandchildren don’t have to live in a plastic bubble, filtering every environmental pollutant through a fire hose of sanitized oxygen, we better make “going green” a personal and a public necessity. I’m not a huge fan of California’s current governor, but I am supportive of his environmental policies—advocating for solar technologies, reducing fuel emissions, more widespread applications for bio-fuels and all around aggressive strategies to reduce our dependence on oil, domestic or foreign. As we think about easy steps to go green in our houses, what about going green with our personal choices? I’m not talking about organic food, more algae-based Omega 3 supplements instead of fish based ones, or the holy grail of health, drinking more water. No one’s against drinking more water and less Coca-cola except maybe kids. It’s our universal love of bottled water that concerns me. In 2005, Americans alone drank some 37 billion bottles of water, despite the well known fact that in most parts of the country, public tap water is not only perfectly drinkable but also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart. Our public water systems disclose the quality of their water while most bottlers refuse to do the same. Only 10% or so of these bottles are currently recycled—imagine 33.3 billion bottles in a landfill in the US alone.

Add that manufacturing plastic bottles for bottled water creates an astounding amount of pollution in the packaging, transport, and refrigeration-- an annual equivalent of 1.5 billion barrels of oil, according to Food & Water Watch. In an effort to cut costs (have you seen the price of gas these days?) and live my beliefs, I changed my approach to consuming water. Here’s what I did. I bought a Brita Water filter so I was on the absolute safe side around lead and mercury content. I poured the filtered tap water into a funky grey Nalprene bottle I purchased at Walgreens for $5.99. These nifty, lightweight and dishwasher safe bottles are not just for hitchhikers and athletes anymore. I carry it around with me at work and monitor both my daily water intake and the cash I’m saving. My goal is to buy a gorgeous personalized metal water container, like the Boy Scouts used to use with all the money I save. Hippie chic—yep, that’s right. Pull that one out at a meeting with the big boys in the pressed suits. So here’s my rant--just don’t buy bottled water, stick to drinking filtered tap and wine in glass, recyclable bottles, of course. Interested in how corporations are bottling tap water and selling it as from "the source", check out www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org.

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Originally uploaded by jenna_raby